canadapups

There are a couple definitions of "marketing". Most people's definition of "marketing" is "advertising". However, in business school, "marketing" is knowing product fit even before building anything. Knowing the product niche, pricing, market size, competitive advantage... all in the business plan ahead of time. You would not spend any money on advertising (or engineering) without knowing all this. Lean startup is backward in this sense.

EDIT: i guess my point is, engineering isn't cheap either. Shouldn't be OK spending that money ahead of product fit either.

There may be survivorship bias because his slower, low-cost strategy is a good way to survive! The longer he survives, the greater chance his product takes off. If you go guns blazing, you effectively put death in the business plan and success is only a contingency.

I guess, but he's doing a note-taking app. I think that niche is as old as Detroit.

I run an online business with my wife. Her background is in marketing. When I explained the MVP idea to her, she thought it was the dumbest idea ever. In her eyes spending expensive marketing dollars to bring people to see anything but a full featured product is a disaster. You only have 1 shot and 5 seconds of their attention so you better make sure they like what they see.

Any pivoting in the business strategy means you don't know your business space. Business opportunities and the required value-add features should be painfully obvious if you have experience and know the industry/niche.

I learnt to code and started my online business in my 30s because it's fun. Age shouldn't stop anyone from fun.

I agree. You can force diversity in gender and race (eg. require 1 woman on your board), but they can all still think the same.

When I asked a few tech friends about launching my business, it was this: create a minimum viable product (MVP), apply to a start-up accelerator, get funding, eat ramen, do things that scale, do things that don't scale, move fast break things. That is "the way".

The instant my wife (business partner, computer illiterate, masters degree in marketing) heard of the MVP idea, she went on a mini-rant: "huh? what? Advertising is sooo expensive. No way are we spending all that money at launch to bring in people to see a minimum product. When customers come to our website, we'll have 5 seconds to hook them, so we better have all the features right in their face. If they don't see what they like, they're never coming back"...

Her perspective is so far from the tech scene that this happens repeatedly. Tech guys repeat what they read in some blog which then boggles my wife's mind.

In a different HN discussion regarding MBA degrees, it was stated a couple times that you could just read 2 books and get the MBA curriculum. They don't realize all the different perspectives that you get from business school discussions. It's not about the hard skills. In business school we spent a lot of time doing Harvard Business Cases and hearing from a diversity of opinions.

No, I didn't mean smart people can't pick up business. I meant you would assume smart people know business as common sense, but they don't necessarily do.

You saying a combination of 2 books would exceed a entire MBA curriculum is the true "pure hoohah" here.

Yes, this what I meant: "OP may have assumed that since his knowledge is comparatively trivial for STEM people to learn, the knowledge might be widespread among what he thinks of as smart people, and was surprised when this valuable knowledge wasn't." Sorry for the confusion.

Come on... most MBA programs are 2 years of full time study. You really going to compare "just Google it" or "digesting some key books like The Mom Test" to a MBA program? To push the logic further, what if it was a Harvard or Stanford MBA?

I never said it can't be learnt. Business knowledge can be learnt through study and experience. For example, taking a MBA degree is one way. Many people who spent lots of time learning and building compilers haven't put the time to study or have the experience in business... which can make a MBA degree useful for them.

I have an undergrad finance degree + finance career. I also run a website I built my self as a side project (see profile if curious).

For a while after learning to code, I thought my business degree was useless. My coding skills felt so empowering compared to my finance/business skills. I can create with coding... learn and do. A car mechanics certificate felt more useful than a business degree.

Over this period of introspection, I started paying attention to whenever my business/finance knowledge was actually useful. I very quickly realized that very smart people often have very little knowledge of finance and business. Business knowledge that I assumed as common sense (due to being surrounded by other finance people) is completely enlightening to others. With a business degree you learn how the world works, which is very important to anyone who wants to be entrepreneurial.

For my side project website (see my profile), I started to implement PayPal and got seriously confused with the documentation and process (I'm not a professional developer). Mid-process I actually didn't even know if I was even dealing with PayPal or Braintree anymore. Then magically I received a package in the mail from Moneris. They shipped me a stack of those carbon-copy paper credit card slips and machine (that cha-chunk sound)... for my website. This was like 3 years ago.

I asked my professional dev friend what the heck was going on and he told me to use Stripe. Never heard of Stripe before that. Friend also told me his revenue was frozen for weeks/months by PayPal for his projects. A weekend later, I was done implementing Stripe.

My partner insisted I use PayPal because that's what everyone recognized/used, but I flat out refused after implementing Stripe.

I needed traffic from the buy-side and sell-side.

On the sell side (breeders), I can just google for new customers! Many dog breeders have their own websites. I search for dog breeders and then contact them through their website (either their webform or their published emails).

On the buy-side (people looking for pets), I pay for google ads on certain keyword searches. As my website became more relevant, the cost of the ads dropped significantly and I started getting more organic searches. Getting buy-side is more difficult for me. Once you find your new pet, you don't need to visit my website anymore, so customer retention is bad... something I need to work on.

I have a finance career, plus I built CanadaPups.com. Very little maintenance and costs, but lots of fun to tinker and improve it as a hobby. Just letting it grow on its own as I'm kinda out of ideas of how to kick it up a notch - suggestions welcome!. https://canadapups.com

The article title “people like you more than you know” might actually apply to you... From reading your past couple comments you might be perceiving that people are always trying to one-up you when that may not be their intention.

My wife is a dog breeder. My anecdotal sample size is getting close to the sample size of the study.

In one litter you will get such a large range of personalities even with same parents and being raised the same.

And then there’s such a big range of behaviours between the breeds. For example, weimaraners are predisposed to separation anxiety.

In addition, some owners adopt or rescue dogs who had bad experiences.

With the article behind a paywall, I’m guessing a sample size of 70 is way too small to come up with something insightful. How on earth could they come up with a “negative spiral” from the data. Sounds made up.

Anyway, I’ve stopped judging owners based on the behaviour of their dogs.

My wife is a dog breeder in Canada. She was starting to get worried about her dependence on Kijiji as the only site to advertise her puppy litters. Kijiji is a de facto monopoly due to network effects and they have slowly been increasing the fee they charge to post. In addition all other alternative sites are terrible - filled with pet scams.

I built CanadaPups.com as an alternative. Free to post. Started a couple of years ago. Growing slowly but consistently. I pretty much spend my nights afterwork fighting pet scams. I wanted to hire a web designer but she prefers the site to look "hand-made" for a softer feel… ok dog brown color it is then :). Any constructive feedback is welcome! Trying to grow it.

https://canadapups.com